Lenovo ThinkPad P50 Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design, & Features

When we say ThinkPad, you probably think of business executives heading to the jetway or conference room with matte black laptops under their arms or in their briefcases (or else you think of Lenovo's TrackPoint cursor control nubbin embedded in the keyboard). But the ThinkPad brand serves another audience besides the pinstriped set: designers, architects, and 4K video editors who need to head into the field or home for the weekend with the jumbo datasets of their desktop workstations.

Lenovo's newest mobile workstations drop the old W prefix for the letter P. We recently reviewed the 17.3-inch ThinkPad P70, a 7.5-pound luggable with Intel Xeon power and a stellar 4K screen. Now the P70 has a 15.6-inch sibling, the ThinkPad P50, available with the same sixth-generation Xeon E3-1505M v5 processor and a beautiful 4K (3,840x2,160) display of its own.

Lenovo says the screen can show 100 percent of the NTSC color gamut, which is substantially larger than the sRGB gamut. And like the P70, the P50 comes with an X-Rite Pantone color calibrator to auto-adjust the panel so the colors you see on screen will match printed or prepress output.

If you've read our other laptop workstation reviews, you know that such systems carry a premium price over run-of-the-mill notebooks. The ThinkPad P50 starts at $1,322 with a Core i7 chip, 1080p display, and 500GB hard drive. Our test unit stepped up to the Xeon CPU and 4K screen, as well as a 512GB PCIe solid-state drive, 16GB of RAM, the color calibrator, and Windows 10 Pro instead of Home; it cost $2,380.

As for performance, the ThinkPad went toe to toe with the similarly equipped HP ZBook 15 G3—which has the same CPU and Nvidia Quadro M2000M graphics but a lower-resolution full HD instead of 4K display—in our workstation benchmarks. The Lenovo posted 90 frames per second in Cinebench 11.5's OpenGL animation to the HP's 94, and was equally close in POV-Ray 3.7's off-screen render test (taking 171 seconds to the HP's 168). In SPECviewperf, a benchmark that renders and rotates 3D and wireframe models using viewsets from popular workstation apps, the P50 beat the ZBook in Creo (43fps to 41fps) and Maya (36fps to 35fps) but trailed in SolidWorks (67fps to 73fps).

Design

While it isn't all metal—the bottom is magnesium and aluminum while the lid is glass fiber-reinforced plastic—the ThinkPad provides a surface that's easy to grip while resisting fingerprints and smudges. It's no problem to carry one-handed when closed—when it's open is another story—or to wedge the 1.2 by 14.9 by 9.9-inch laptop into an average-sized briefcase.

At 5.9 pounds, the P50 is much easier to move around than the larger P70, but noticeably heavier than some high-end 15-inch laptops such as the 4.5-pound Dell XPS 15 or Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Its brickish AC adapter adds to the unlikelihood of traveling light.

There's no flex in the keyboard and only a little if you grasp and wiggle the display's top corners. The workstation is sturdy enough to pass 11 MIL-STD durability tests including shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. Considering that, we're disappointed that the standard warranty is the same one year of carry-in or depot service you get with a cheap consumer laptop, although Lenovo offers up to five years of next-business-day on-site service and accidental damage protection as extra-cost options.

The medium-thick bezel around the screen accommodates a 720p Webcam that captured decent images in good light, but slightly noisy and discolored selfies in our not-very-bright home office. Two 1.5-watt speakers produce sound that's loud enough to fill a conference room, if a tad tinny or AM radio-like for music playback.

Plenty of ports wrap around three sides of the system. The left edge is devoted to card readers, with SD, ExpressCard, and SmartCard slots. On the right, you'll find two USB 3.0 ports along with Mini DisplayPort and audio connectors. Two more USB 3.0 ports, one able to charge handheld devices, are at the rear, as are Ethernet and HDMI ports and one Thunderbolt 3/USB Type-C port for high-speed storage or docking solutions.

Features

The 15.6-inch display isn't a touch screen, but it is an in-plane switching (IPS) panel, so images look great from virtually any viewing angle. Its 300 nits of brightness are ample for indoor use, though like nearly every laptop we've ever tried, the contrast washed out in direct sunlight.

Colors are rich and text is crisp, as you'd expect from the Lenovo's 3,840x2,160 resolution; the P50 arrived with Windows 10's scaling of screen elements set to 250 percent, though one preloaded diagnostic utility popped up in a postage-stamp window in the middle of the display.

The coolest preloaded utility is the X-Rite Pantone color calibrator, which works with a sensor in the palm rest. You adjust a couple of settings to your liking, then close the lid. A series of beeps followed by a final chirp means you can lift the lid, revealing the fine-tuned display and reassuring you that your photo or prepress output will look like the files you created on the workstation.

The spacious keyboard offers perks ranging from a numeric keypad to a microphone mute alongside the volume and audio mute buttons. The top-row keys such as Esc and Delete are small compared to the giant Enter, Shift and Backspace keys, but include dedicated Home and End keys to go with the dedicated PgUp and PgDn keys down by the cursor arrows.

Typing feel is fabulous, with ample travel and a snappy tactile response; we'd say the ThinkPad feels as good as any laptop keyboard, or maybe any non-mechanical keyboard, we've tested. The palm rest holds, in addition to a fingerprint reader, a smooth-gliding touch pad with three buttons below and three above, the latter set for use with the TrackPoint pointing stick found at the intersection of the G, H, and B keys. The pad needed a firm tap rather than a light touch to click, but we soon adjusted.